R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (p. 9):
The works of a number of major writers have been examined from this point of view, and we are in a position to form a clear picture of the classical reading of Alcuin, John of Salisbury, Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Ronsard, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, to name only a few. Caution, however, is very necessary. If a man quotes a passage, he has read it; but we must not assume that he has read the work in which it occurs. Quotations were often taken second-hand from grammar books. The researches of C.K. Ullman have revealed that anthologies contributed largely to the classical knowledge of medieval scholars; and everybody has been aware for a long time now that many of the Renaissance pundits, like Rabelais and Ben Jonson, similarly derived the greater part of their erudition from popular handbooks. Nor can we accept without reserve the claims made by individuals that they or others had read certain classical authors, for no medieval or Renaissance writer is altogether free from the minor vice of exaggeration.
Clovis however came and made war against Ragnachar. Ragnachar, seeing that his army had been defeated, prepared to slip away, but as he was doing so he was captured by his army, had his hands tied behind his back, and was brought before Clovis along with his brother Ricchar. Clovis addressed him thus: “Why did you humiliate our people by letting them tie you up? It would have been better for you to die.” Raising the axe, he fixed it into his head, and turning to his brother he said, “If you had granted your brother some solace, he would not at any rate have been bound up” and killed him with a similar blow of the axe.
After their deaths, the men who had betrayed them learned that the gold which they had received from the king was adulterated. When they complained of this to the king himself, he responded, “Rightly does one receive such gold when they lead their master to death by their own choice.” He added that it ought to be enough for them to live on that they would not atone for the betrayal of their master by dying under torture. When they heard this, they decided to take the hint and the favor, claiming that it was indeed enough for them if they were allowed to live.
There were however relations of the king mentioned earlier: their brother, named Rignomeris, was killed in the city of Mans on the orders of Clovis. After their deaths, Clovis received all of their kingdoms and all of their treasure. Once all of these and many other kings had been killed along with his nearest relations (who, he feared, might take his kingdom away from him), he extended his reign over all of Gaul. Then he gathered all of his people together at once and he said to have spoken about his relations, whom he killed, in this way: “Ah, pity me, I who remain as a stranger in a strange land and have no relatives who could help me if I were faced with some adversity!” He said this not to grieve over their deaths, but to lay a trap to see whether he might find someone else whom he could kill.
Veniens autem Chlodovechus, bellum contra eum instruit. At ille devictum cernens exercitum suum, fuga labi parat, sed ab exercitum conpraehensus ac ligatis postergum manibus in conspectu Chlodovechi una cum Richario fratre suo perducetur. Cui ille: ‘Cur’, inquid, ‘humiliasti genus nostrum, ut te vincere permitteris? Melius enim tibi fuerat mori’. Et elevatam securem capite eius defixit, conversusque ad fratrem eius, ait: ‘Si tu solatium fratri tribuissis, allegatus utique non fuisset’; similiter et hunc secure percussum interfecit.
Post quorum mortem cognuscent proditores eorum, aurum, quod a regi acceperant, esse adulterum. Quod cum rege dixissent, ille respondisse fertur: ‘Merito’, inquid, ‘tale aurum accepit, qui domino suo ad mortem propria voluntate deducit’; hoc illis quod viverent debere sufficere, ne male proditionem dominorum suorum luituri inter tormenta deficerent. Quod ille audientes, optabant gratiam adipisci, illud sibi adserentes sufficere, si vivere mererentur. Fuerunt autem supradicti regis propinqui huius; quorum frater Rignomeris nomen apud Cinomannis civitatem ex iusso Chlodovechi est interfectus. Quibus mortuis, omnem regnum eorum et thesaurus Chlodovechus accepit. Interfectisque et aliis multis regibus vel parentibus suis primis, de quibus zelum habebat, ne ei regnum auferrent, regnum suum per totas Gallias dilatavit. Tamen, congregatis suis quadam vice, dixisse fertur de parentibus, quos ipse perdiderat: ‘Vae mihi, qui tamquam peregrinus inter extraneus remansi et non habeo de parentibus, qui mihi, si venerit adversitas, possit aliquid adiuvare’. Sed hoc non de morte horum condolens, sed dolo dicebat, si forte potuisset adhuc aliquem repperire, ut interficeret.
Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. (John 12:24)
Don’t they need for the koliva almonds, pomegranates, walnuts and pine kernels, hemp seeds, lentils, chickpeas and raisins? (Ptochoprodromos, II 43-45)
It was an austere center table, fit for the occasion. A small rectangular koliva on a metal tray, with the vague shape of a cross on it and adorned only with chocolate drops, a white candle and a burner bowl with incense. It didn’t resemble the mourners’ tables I remember from the Greek Orthodox villages in northern Lebanon around Koura and Akkar, with their ornate “Rahmee” (the Arabic name for Koliva in Lebanon), boiled wheat kernels covered in pistachios, pecans, almonds and raisins, decorated with powdered sugar and passed around in glass bowls in the mourners’ homes during the different stages of commemorations of the dead.
But this wasn’t just any other mourners’ home. After a devastating earthquake shook the earth in Turkey and Syria, Antioch was destroyed (it is said that about half of the buildings in modern-day Antakya collapsed, but that roughly 90% of them will have to be demolished), and on the 40th day of mourning, as per the Orthodox as well as Muslim traditions, Antiochians gathered in Istanbul, to commemorate their dead.
In the Eastern churches, it is believed that the soul continues to wander the Earth for another 40 days after the initial death. While wandering about, the soul visits significant places from their life as well as their fresh graves. But in a situation such as Antioch’s, what kind of final rest would they find if their city has been destroyed together with their own lives? What if there’s no grave?
A natural disaster that blended with political vacuum has killed thousands, many are still missing, news of deceased people arrive constantly and millions are displaced across a dozen provinces of Turkey and Syria. Antiochians are now living in tents, have gone into exile, or simply remain in the limbo of uncertainty. It brings to mind the words American writer Susan Sontag had for the people of Sarajevo in 1993: “For they also know themselves to be terminally weak; waiting, hoping, not wanting to hope, knowing that they aren’t going to be saved. They are humiliated by their disappointment, by their fear, and by the indignities of daily life.”
Source: Twitter
This week an iconic picture began making the rounds of the Internet, a nearly destroyed house in Antioch, with a scribble on the wall that reads: If the house collapses, please call, there’s a dead body inside. Other images like that followed.
During a visit to Antakya, on February 20th, a few hours before the third major earthquake which destroyed St. Ilyas Church in Samandağ and that we survived by sheer chance, a stroll near the now heavily militarized old city of Antakya, opened our senses to the reality of Antioch’s destruction: A strong smell of putrescine, a volatile diamine that results from the breakdown of fatty acids in the putrefying tissue of dead bodies, and which our species is conditioned to be repulsed by. The number of bodies under the rubble is unknown.
Many others have been buried in unmarked mass graves, and the luckier ones, were able to retrieve the bodies of their relatives, with the help of rescue workers, often paying for additional equipment, and transporting the bodies themselves, to their resting places.
The truth is that it’s not possible to call mourning the spectacle of human cruelty that Antiochians endured over the 40 days that elapsed between February 6th and March 18th.
Anna Maria Beylunioglu and Can Terbiyeli, 40th day memorial, March 18, 2023, Istanbul.
In Istanbul, the gathering took place at the office of ISTOS, a publishing house born 12 years ago out of the initiative of members of the Istanbul Greek community to publish Greek works in Turkish and vice versa, whose nearby cafe disappeared with the pandemic and one of the last places where I sat before the lockdowns in March 2020. In fact, it was their volume “Muhacirname”, on the poetry of the Karamanlides refugees from Central Anatolia, what first inspired our work for the exhibition “After Utopia: The Birds”, now at Sadberk Hanim Museum in Istanbul.
The atmosphere that day was friendly but solemn, as mourners and friends gathered around the table with “slika” (the Antiochian name for koliva) and incense, sharing their grief and testimonies of loss. For many members of the Antiochian community in Turkey and elsewhere–there’s a significant diaspora in Europe and the Middle East, the 40 days of mourning have actually been occupied with worrying, self-organizing, raising funds, finding help, or simply avoiding death. The number 40 contains multiple meanings in the Bible: The Great Flood lasted 40 days, the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years, prophet Elijah walked 40 days to reach Horeb.
Two women, amidst tears, shared their personal stories not only of the gruesome events of the day and the abandonment to which Antiochians were subjected, not only of grief and the loss of death, but also of the ongoing tragedy which overlaps with a disarray of facts that we already know: There are still bodies under the rubble; container houses are being talked about while there are people without tents; even those with tents are not protected from the seasonal floods and the rain.
Slika. Courtesy: The author.
But the intimate nature of their testimonies gave a new dimension to suffering: In fact, we remain at the gates and have not quite perambulated the deep terrain. As people were so overwhelmed with survival, of themselves, and others, there was no time to feel grief, it is all still on the surface. These women, dressed in black, reminded me of Aeschylus’ Suppliants, a play about ancient women refugees seeking asylum at a border, depicting not only their struggle to safety but the strife within the city that ultimately shelters them. King Pelasgus speaks:
For truly, it is to my undoing that I have come into this quarrel and yet I prefer to be unskilled rather than practiced in the lore of foretelling ill. (Aesch. Supp. 452-454)
But so far there’s no city welcoming the now-refugees of Antioch. Even though people want more than anything to return to their own city, if not to the same houses, but to the city itself, destroyed so many times and just as many rebuilt, encapsulated in the slogan “Geri Döneceğiz” (we will be back) scribbled on many buildings in the region.
“Cevlik mama”. Courtesy: The author.
I myself thought of spray painting it on the ruins of our small house in the village of Çevlik, which completely collapsed, after I saw it on February 11th, on my way to the earthquake region. My heart sank for the first time. I spent a few minutes wandering about, unable to cry, calling out loud the nickname of our kitty friend, “Çevlik mama”, the most ferocious and loyal feral cat, who visited our doorstep every morning. We still haven’t found her, but we will continue searching for her, with the hope that somehow she has survived. But this is only a small metaphor for the unspeakable destruction (and hope).
The Istanbul gathering was organized by the platform Nehna, founded only over a year ago, with the mission to publish materials related to the history of Antiochian Christians but that overnight turned into a self-organizing and activism front after the earthquake, as well as a media face for Antioch, in particular the charismatic Anna Maria Beylunioğlu, an academic based in Istanbul, and the Stanford history PhD candidate Emre Can Dağlioğlu.
But they’re not the entirety of the team; Ketrin Köpru was present at the memorial in Istanbul even though she’s more often in Samandağ coordinating resources, as well as Mișel Uyar in Iskenderun, and others such as Can Terbiyeli and Ferit Tekbaș. And there’re so many other people involved in the relief efforts for Antioch I couldn’t possibly list them all or what they do. Sometimes I feel as if the memorial was also a celebration of the life of those courageous people who against all odds have continued working for this beleaguered region.
A young psychologist, Barıș Yapar, himself an earthquake refugee, spoke at the gathering about the reactions to life-changing natural disasters that go through different phases–heroism, honeymoon, disillusionment and restoration. But he hastened to add that in a situation such as this when relief is not stable, people can’t create a sustainable way to cope with their trauma and instead, go through all the different phases at the same time.
Laki Vingas, a prominent lay leader of the Greek community in Istanbul was also present there, offering not only words of support for the Antiochian community but also the preparedness of Istanbul’s Greek establishment to support them in the reconstruction. Although differing in language and some traditions, the small community of Antiochians and Greeks shares the same faith and fate, and belongs to the same ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Turkey due to political geography.
A striking testimony was that of Ibrahim Usta, a rather known face in the Old City of Antakya, for being one of the city’s most famous humuscu, a traditional humus maker, of which there are so few left. If you had been to his place, near the Bade winehouse and both the Greek Orthodox and Protestant churches (all of them now in ruins), you would taste this humble paste made of chickpeas or beans, and taste the whole of Antakya–it was more than just food, it was an ancient foam made out of silk. He spoke vividly about the earthquake day, the fear, the destruction, but more than anything, the loneliness, the abandonment that hovered over Antioch like a thick fog.
The slika on the table was plain and only slightly sugared, fit for such an occasion, where mourning has not even begun, let alone ended. Perhaps one day they will serve a lavish koliva adorned with almonds, pomegranates, walnuts and raisins, as the Byzantines did, and richly covered in fine powdered sugar, once Antioch has risen again and the mourning has been concluded.
Thinking about food and the history of slika/koliva, makes me reflect on the long journey of Antioch and its people into the ancient past of Cilicia and the Eastern Mediterranean. Anna Maria Beylunioğlu, herself a researcher on the histories of minority cuisines in the region, writes that there are different versions on the origin of slika (also called hadig by Armenians and danik by Kurds): “It is a tradition carried from Central Asia, based on shamanic beliefs. It is said that it became widespread in Anatolia in the 3rd or 4th century.”
Beylunioğlu also notes that the recipe was known to the 12th Byzantine poet Ptochoprodromos, whose recipe is quoted above. But recipes vary greatly from place to place, even within the Antakya-Iskenderun-Mersin Arabic-speaking Orthodox continuum. She relates a funny tale about how Mersin’s Christians describe Samandağ’s slika as “the work of the poor”, and Mersin’s nut-rich slika fillings are likened by Antiochians to a “cookie”.
But I think the story goes much further back: Κόλλυβα is the plural form of the rarely used singular κόλλυβο, derived from the Classical Greek κόλλυβος, a small coin or gold weight. In the Hellenistic world, with Antioch as its capital, the neuter plural form took the meaning of small pies made of boiled wheat. This is from where the ritual sense of koliva derives.
The Charonion monument, Antakya. Courtesy: The author.
It also overlaps with an even older past: For the Ancient Greeks, the beginning of spring was the Athenian festival of Anthesteria, held for three days in the month of Anthesterion (February-March), as a rite of passage from winter to spring, from death to life. During the third day of the festival, Greeks prepared panspermia, a multigrain soup based on boiled wheat, offered to Hermes Chthonius and the dead. The god is associated with the underworld, and a psychopomp who helps guide the souls of the deceased into the afterlife, just like Antioch’s famous Charonion. I guess this is the first predecessor of koliva, which evolved into its current form around the 4th century.
Theodore Balsamon, a 12th century Eastern Orthodox patriarch of Antioch, maintains that the practice of koliva as a ritual food originated with Athanasius the Great, the 20th pope of Alexandria, during the reign of Julian the Apostate, in the 4th century; he is known for the destruction of a Christian shrine in the site of the former temple of Apollo in Harbiye, which is today still used for divination practices by Arab Alawites.
This unbreakable thread connecting present-day Antioch to its many pasts is one of the reasons for the incessant mourning of its people, for whom this past is buried deep inside themselves, even if the destructions of Antioch have erased a lot of the archaeological evidence of its many lives. The preparation of slika, with the long cooking hours of the blessed wheat, and the nine basic ingredients, representing the nine ranks of angels looking over human affairs, symbolizes this deep past.
But slika is not only a tradition among Orthodox Christians; it is also used by Arab Alawites and other communities, to mark not only death but also birth, the toothing of children, or the life of saints. The social dimension of food contains our history as a whole, an idea I’m borrowing from Beylunioğlu. Alongside the slika, the informal memorial gathering in Istanbul–one without prayers, was punctuated by the smell of frankincense. The smell could immediately transport one not only to churches in Mersin, Samandağ or Beirut, but to more familiar spaces, such as a Levantine grandmother’s house, where incense was burnt in a censer, religiously every Sunday after mass. The burning, pungent smell that terrified everyone during childhood, felt now so warm, so inviting; an embassy from a lost world.
Botanist Yelda Güzel writes that most of the frankincense used in recent years comes from the resin of the Boswellia and Commiphora trees of Yemeni origin, and resin from logwood. She tells us however that the oldest frankincense is without a doubt the one present in the local flora of Antioch: Mahaleb bark, rosary tree, Antiochian sage, and zahter.
Courtesy: Susan Kiryaman, Yeniden Samandag.
In the afternoon of March 18th, marking the 40 days, Antiochians in Istanbul were not the only ones burning frankincense. Women of Samandağ took to the streets in large numbers, in a procession of public mourning for their dead, their destroyed city and their interrupted life–indeed an unprecedented event, holding the traditional Reyhan and frankincense that mark births, children’s first baths, weddings and funerals, and chanting aloud in Arabic, “Ma rohna, nehna hon” (we haven’t died, we’re still here). Although the event went poorly noticed, it was a rare moment of acting in concert, visceral, sad, grievous, but also full of power and resistance to this new reality.
The Reyhan also has an ancient history of its own: Although it is often called basil or sweet basil, it has nothing to do with Ocimum basillicum. Reyhan is actually the ancient myrtle, a plant sacred to the goddess Aphrodite as a symbol of love, and wreaths made from laurel, ivy and myrtle were awarded to athletes and soldiers; Hellenistic myrtle wreaths made of gold have been found in graves. There are countless mentions of the plant in classical literature, from Homer and Plato to Euripides and Aristophanes, from Polybius and Strabo to Hippocrates and Arataeus.
Once again, it is Arab Alawites in particular who have kept these traditions alive, after they were long forgotten in the region. The mournful chants of Samandağ resembled the defiant final speech of Antigone to the chorus that decreed her death, amidst great injustice, in a city forbidding to honor the dead with a burial. The abandonment of Samandağ to its own fate, without regard for the living or the unburied dead, after many years of purposeful oblivion and neglect:
Ah, you mock me! In the name of our father’s gods, why do you not wait to abuse me until after I have gone, and not to my face, O my city, and you, her wealthy citizens? Ah, spring of Dirce, and you holy ground of Thebes whose chariots are many, you, at least, will bear me witness how unwept by loved ones, and by what laws I go to the rock-closed prison of my unheard-of tomb! Ah, misery! I have no home among men or with the shades, no home with the living or with the dead. (Soph. Ant. 839-850)
It’s quite an interesting plot twist that Antigone, the niece of king Creon, who in turn sentenced her to death over her disobedience of the law, claims the political subject of the stranger, by calling herself μέτοικος, technically a resident alien. According to Andrés Hénao, Antigone distinguishes here political membership from citizenship and challenges the inequality of her position, albeit by tragic means. In this sense, according to Hénao and his theatrical experiment with Palestinian women in Jenin, she performs a counter-politics in which she, as a member of a royal household, identifies with the defeated, which in our world today could identify with refugees, immigrants and undocumented people.
Women of Samandag. Courtesy: Afet icin Feminist Dayanisma.
It seems to me an apt metaphor for the women of Samandağ, who not only have been treated as foreigners in their own land–dark humor about Antiochians being foreigners is a daily bread in the community, but who have also become strangers in an expanded sense: “The stranger, having lost his home and political status, is the equivalent to the loss of a juridical-political space of recognition and cannot find another one.”
This stranger is already outside the place called home, but yet there’s no place outside of it. Every place where the stranger arrives, is already somebody else’s home, and the paradox is that one cannot belong to a world he inhabits, with a right at least as equal as others to do so, because belonging to that world is only guaranteed by already belonging to a previously established political community, secured by a home and citizenship. The crisis of homelessness exemplified by these women, and embodied in the millions of displaced persons from the earthquake region is in fact not just a problem of aid policy or bureaucratic administration, but a political question of the first order. A people without a home, paradoxically, cannot be visible in the public realm.
In the tradition, the boiled wheat of slika represents both the earth and the body of the deceased, as a symbol of hope and resurrection. So there’s in fact a kind of return. According to St. John, a grain of wheat must first fall to the ground and die before it can return to bear life. This innocent metaphor, transcending across the different cultures coexisting in this geography, has survived into our own time because the tradition shaped the ritual aspect of wheat, as much as wheat, a basic staple in the Mediterranean basin, shaped the traditions of the place.
But wheat is not only about the hope of resurrection: How is the wheat that fell to the ground going to rise into life if there are no earthly homes to harvest it? We need Antioch to rise for an eighth time, after its seven destructions and reconstructions, as As Mișel Orduluoğlu has written for Nehna, in a moving tribute in honor of the 40 days:
“Antakya, this city which was destroyed seven times and rebuilt seven times. The Queen of the East, who had covered her head with a black scarf seven times, and the seven times she got up and lowered her scarf around her neck, and put back her magnificent crown: Once a woman of this land has taken it off her head, it is as if to signal that it is her duty to keep the memory of those who are no longer here by wearing it again. The mosaics were scattered seven times, the stones as well, but they were seven times re-arranged, while preserving the place of the lost stones. […] Now for the eighth time, Antakya has fallen, and this city has draped her black scarf on her head for the eighth time, the Queen of the East, for the eighth time the stones of the mosaic were scattered […]. Now we will put the queen’s crown on her head again, but this time more magnificently, we will arrange the stones of the mosaic again, but this time it will be stronger and the voice of the brothers will rise again, this time louder.”
The Mosaic of Briseis Farewell, Hatay Archaeological Museum. Courtesy: the author.
A fragment of the mosaic of Briseis’ Farewell, excavated in 1935 under a house in Antakya and on display at the Hatay Archaeological Museum (it was surprisingly missing the last time we visited last summer), can tell you the story of Antioch. Only two figures are left from the panel: Patroclus holding Briseis’ hand. Her story in the Iliad sets the mood of the Trojan War and the events of the Odyssey. A legend says that after the death of Achilles, Briseis sank into great grief as she began preparing him for the afterlife.
But this is not the farewell depicted in the Antakya mosaic. It is actually about the speech she gave after the death of Patroclus who was always protecting her. Though she was herself enslaved, and Achilles never actually married her, she remained by his side, and the always gentle Patroclus, comforted her, even though it was something below his status as a hero. Briseis, in the farewell song of the mosaic, is depicted as golden like Aphrodite herself. Briseis is Antakya and Patroclus the countless dead Antiochians lost under the rubble.
Patroclos, you were the dearest to wretched me and
I left you alive when I went from your dwelling.
And now I find you here dead, leader of the armies,
When I return. Troubles are always wrestling me from
troubles. (Hom. Il. 19:287-290)
τώ σ᾽ ἄμοτον κλαίω τεθνηότα μείλιχον αἰεί.
So now I weep for you, dead and gentle forever. (Hom. Il. 19.300)
At the end of the memorial gathering, the last pot of the bitter Antiochian coffee was poured, and the plastic cups with the remaining slika were removed from the table as people took their leave in small groups, and then it was just the intoxicating noises and sights of Istanbul again, a city apparently immortal, where life continues no matter what. This indifference is key to its survival. The conversations about Antioch continued into the night, often mixing fantasy and reality; the desire to build a new home in place of the old, and what this home would look like, the shelves, the windows, the gardens, contrasted with the deteriorating sanitary conditions, the political volatility of the country, the uncertain food security, the fear of permanent displacement, and above all, the boundless cruelty that envelops everything. I keep thinking about the symbolism of the fine powdered sugar on the outer layer of the koliva: An uplifting sweet welcome into paradise. If only…
But something that the botanist Güzel said still gives me hope: “The ancient traditions of our destroyed city have survived for centuries. If they have managed to reach our own time in spite of all the destruction of the city in history, we are also trying to rebuild them and get them back on their feet. It means we have hope, our myrtle and our incense are still in our mountains after all…”
In my mind, whenever I see the images of the women of Samandağ with their myrtle branches and incense censers, chanting that they’re still alive, I see not only the enormous grief, but also the promise of a very blessed, very ancient land, and the light blue waters surrounding Kara Magara, in the southernmost tip of Antioch, just a few hundred meters from the Syrian border–deep, pristine, translucent. All of that will still be there somehow, glowing under the scorching sun, forever.
In times like this I remember the words of an Orthodox monk and poet, Silouan the Athonite from Mt. Athos: “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.”
Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a writer and art critic based in Izmir. He’s also tweeting about classics, archaeology, heritage, contemporary art and Turkey/Greece. Follow Arie on twitter (@byzantinologue) for updates and new articles as they come out.
When several years earlier I had, for the kingdom of heaven, separated myself from home, from my parents, from my sister, from my relations, and – what is more difficult than this – from the habit of taking finer food, and as I was heading as a soldier to fight for Jerusalem, I found that I missed the library which I had created in Rome with the utmost zeal and labor. After depriving myself of sleep for several nights, and after the tears which the recollection of my past sings brought to my eyes, I took Plautus up in my hands. If ever I returned to myself and began to read the Prophets, their unrefined speech made my hair stand on end. And because I could not see the light with my blind eyes, I thought it was not the fault of those eyes, but of the sun. Thus while the ancient serpent deceived me, a fever spread through my marrow in the middle of Lent and waged war upon my exhausted body. And without any rest (which seems also incredible to say), it ate away at my wretched limbs to such a degree that I could barely cling to my bones. My funeral was being prepared, and the vital heat of my soul, with my whole body now freezing, remained beating only in my lukewarm little heart.
Suddenly, I was taken in spirit and dragged to the seat of a judge. There was so much light, so much shining from the clarity of those standing around, that I threw myself to the floor and did not dare to glance up. When asked about my condition, I responded that I was a Christian. And he who was presiding as judge said, ‘You lie! You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where your treasure is, there too is your heart (Matth. 6.21).’ There I stood silent, and amidst my lashings, I thought over that little verse: “Who will grant anything to you in Hell?” (Ps. 6.6)
It starts with Cicero and ends with searing pain!
Cum ante annos plurimos domo, parentibus sorore, cognatis, et quod his difficilius est, consuetudine lautioris cibi, propter coelorum me regna castrassem, et Jerosolymam militaturus pergerem, Bibliotheca, quam mihi Romae summo studio ac labore confeceram, carere omnino non poteram. Itaque miser ego lecturus Tullium, jejunabam. Post noctium crebras vigilias, post lacrymas, quas mihi praeteritorum recordatio peccatorum ex imis visceribus eruebat, Plautus sumebatur in manus . Si quando in memetipsum reversus, Prophetas legere coepissem, sermo horrebat incultus; et quia lumen caecis oculis non videbam, non oculorum putabam culpam esse, sed solis. Dum ita me antiquus serpens [al. hostis] illuderet, in media ferme Quadragesima medullis infusa febris, corpus invasit exhaustum: et sine ulla requie (quod dictu quoque incredibile sit) sic infelicia membra depasta est, ut ossibus vix haererem. Interim parantur exequiae, et vitalis animae calor, toto frigescente jam corpore, in solo tantum tepente pectusculo palpitabat: Cum subito raptus in spiritu, ad tribunal judicis pertrahor; ubi tantum luminis, et tantum erat ex circumstantium claritate fulgoris, ut projectus in terram, sursum aspicere non auderem. Interrogatus de conditione, Christianum me esse respondi. Et ille qui praesidebat: Mentiris, ait, Ciceronianus es, non Christianus: ubi enim thesaurus tuus, ibi et cor tuum (Matth. 6. 21). Illico obmutui, et inter verbera (nam caedi me jusserat) conscientiae magis igne torquebar, illum mecum versiculum reputans: “In inferno autem quis confitebitur tibi” (Ps. 6. 6)
Because you have asked me, Ioannes, my dearest companion in Christ, in what manner it is proper for you to study in acquiring a treasury of knowledge, such a plan is handed on from me to you: that you should choose to enter through little streams, and not suddenly into the sea, because it is proper that one come gradually through the easier things to the more difficult ones.
This is, therefore, my advice and your instruction. I order you to be slow in speech and slow in acceding to the mouthpiece. Embrace purity of conscience. Do not allow yourself to be free for speech. You should frequently esteem the wine cellar if you wish to be brought into it. Present yourself as lovable to everyone. Don’t look at all deeply into the deeds of others. Don’t show yourself as very familiar with anyone, because excessive familiarity breeds contempt and offers material for subtraction from study. Don’t in any way get yourself embroiled in secular words or deeds. Don’t forget to follow the footsteps of the holy and the good. Don’t consider from whom you are hearing something, but commend to memory whatever good is spoken.
Make sure that you understand what you read and hear. Make yourself certain about doubtful things. Try to store up whatever you can in the wardrobe of your mind as if you wanted to fill up a jar. Don’t seek things higher than your station. Following these steps, you will profer and lead forth the useful blooms and fruits on the vine of the God of Heavenly Hosts as long as you live. If you will have followed all of this eagerly, you will be able to attain what you affect.
Quia quaesisti a me, in Christo mihi carissime Ioannes, qualiter te studere oporteat in thesauro scientiae acquirendo, tale a me tibi traditur consilium: ut per rivulos, non statim in mare, eligas introire, quia per faciliora ad difficiliora oportet devenire. Haec est ergo monitio mea et instructio tua. Tardiloquum te esse iubeo et tarde ad locutorium accedentem; conscientiae puritatem amplectere. Orationi vacare non desinas; cellam frequenter diligas si vis in cellam vinariam introduci. Omnibus te amabilem exhibe; nihil quaere penitus de factis aliorum; nemini te multum familiarem ostendas, quia nimia familiaritas parit contemptum et subtractionis a studio materiam subministrat; de verbis et factis saecularium nullatenus te intromittas; discursus super omnia fugias; sanctorum et bonorum imitari vestigia non omittas; non respicias a quo audias, sed quidquid boni dicatur, memoriae recommenda; ea quae legis et audis, fac ut intelligas; de dubiis te certifica; et quidquid poteris in armariolo mentis reponere satage, sicut cupiens vas implere; altiora te ne quaesieris. Illa sequens vestigia, frondes et fructus in vinea Domini Sabaoth utiles, quandiu vitam habueris, proferes et produces. Haec si sectatus fueris, ad id attingere poteris, quod affectas
Alexandra Paperno. Abolished Constellations, 2016. Installation view at the ‘Møenlight Sonata’, curated by René Block. Kunsthal 44Møen, Møen, Denmark, 2018. Courtesy Galerie Volker Diehl.
Only the famous Argo sailed through there
Returning from the visit with Aeetes.
The current hurdled the ship towards the rocks,
But Hera, who loved Jason, led them safe.
Tritonian Athena herself urged him to join the band of chiefs,
And he came among them a welcome comrade.
She herself too fashioned the swift ship;
And with her Argus, son of Arestor, wrought it by her counsels.
Wherefore it proved the most excellent of all ships,
That have made trial of the sea with oars.
Alexandra Paperno. Abolished Constellations, 2016. Installation view at the ‘Observatory’, curated by Simon Mraz. Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Science and its campus at Lower Arkhyz, Russia, 2016. Photograph by Yuri Palmin.
Who invented the sky? The only way to answer this question would be like this — the first person who looked up and wondered. Socrates tells us in Plato’s Theaetetus (Plat. Theaet. 155d), μάλα γὰρ φιλοσόφου τοῦτο τὸ πάθος, τὸ θαυμάζειν: οὐ γὰρ ἄλλη ἀρχὴ φιλοσοφίας ἢ αὕτη, καὶ ἔοικεν ὁ τὴν Ἶριν Θαύμαντος ἔκγονον φήσας οὐ κακῶς γενεαλογεῖν, namely: “For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy, and he who said that Iris was the child of Thaumas made a good genealogy.” Iris was a messenger of the heavens, so the sky was never too far away for those who wonder. But philosophy arrives too late, and we’re looking at an earlier world, populated with gods, heroes and stars; a world that had already eclipsed in Plato’s time. Was it perhaps at the end of the Ice Age when the brain cortex of the first modern humans began articulating symbolic orders?
An answer is impossible to come by, but the stars in the sky have lived with us for a long time, and we could never unsee them. That is, paradoxically, until the modern age, when, after thousands of years of dreams and wonders, we launched ourselves into space, in an attempt to escape from the condition of being human. Out there we realized to our despair (and our newly discovered indifference too) that there was no such a thing as the sky; this was no transcendental space or a place at all, but rather, everything that is above the surface of the earth, a combination of atmospheric layers and the infinite void. The infinite is not even an adequate concept, for the physical concept of time has no relevance for the individual person, and no use except in space physics. With the conquest of heaven, a direct consequence of the space and arms race, the sky went dimmer, if not altogether silent. Yet the void remains.
But the history of the void, with its now missing stars and constellations, is not a history of physics, as much as a story of our puzzling earthly odyssey, as astronomer John C. Barentine tells us: “However old the constellations, it is safe to conclude that they have long journeyed with us on our path to becoming human.” Constellations are some of the oldest cultural inventions of humans, predating writing and social organization (what once was called civilization). Barentine continues: “The presumably oldest figures in existence, such as the Hunter and the Bull, refer to a time in human history before the emergence of settled agricultural communities. It is probably no coincidence that Orion and Taurus reflect themes in the oldest extant works of art: the human form and game animals.” Already at the time of the Neolithic revolution, 12,000 years ago, understanding cues in the sky about the seasonal calendar was crucial to the survival of early humans.
Alexandra Paperno. Abolished Constellations, 2016. Installation view at the ‘Observatory’, curated by Simon Mraz. Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Science and its campus at Lower Arkhyz, Russia, 2016. Photograph by Yuri Palmin.
Our oldest accounts of constellations and stars date back to the Middle Bronze Age and the list of Sumerian names suggest they were drawn from an earlier source. In the Mesopotamian text “Prayer to the Gods of the Night” (1700 BC), we hear of the Arrow (the star Sirius), the Yoke (the star Arcturus), the Stars (the Pleiades star cluster), or the True Shepherd of Anu (Orion). Think about the long journey of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, known to Homer as the autumn star (Hom. Il. 5.1-5), and to Egyptians and Greeks as the “Dog star”. Its heliacal rise, connected with an extremely hot season at the end of summer, was known not only to Homer and Hesiod but to Aeschylus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Theognis, Eratosthenes, Nonnus and the folk tales about the star and its hot season survive as late as Anna Komnene’s Alexiad in the Byzantine period. Located in the constellation Canis Major, Sirius is still visible to the naked eye.
In the Shield of Achilles (Hom. Il. 18.478-608), provided by Hephaestus in the Iliad, and the first example of ekphrasis, Homer describes in its first layer, a number of constellations: Orion and the Bear, the star clusters of the Pleiades and the Hyades. A telling star-struck passage in the ekphrasis, ἥ τ᾽ αὐτοῦ στρέφεται καί τ᾽ Ὠρίωνα δοκεύει (Hom. Il. 18-488), “She turns about in the same spot and watches for Orion”, reappears in identical form in the Odyssey in a crucial moment, when the nymph Calypso is sending Odysseus from the island of Ogygia, and instructs him to keep on the left side the constellation of the Bear (Hom. Od. 5.270-277), without specifying whether he meant the Little Bear or the Great Bear, in what is the only passage in the epic that refers to stellar navigation. For seventeen days he sailed over the sea, and then on the eighteenth day the land of the Phaeacians appeared nearest to him.
Most of the constellations referred to in these passages have come down to us in Ptolemy’s Almagest, and survived unchallenged for some fourteen centuries, as the cosmological model underwent certain revisions (the geocentric model is of course completely debased, but the Homeric cosmology of the earth as a flat disk surrounded by an ocean and in between two layers of stars, is surprisingly similar to the current model of the Milky Way). The birth of the contemporary sky that begins with the Copernican revolution and ends with Trevor Paglen’s “The Last Pictures” (the sky as a junkyard of dead satellites), arrived also with discoveries of new stars and constellations, adding up to the 48 Ptolemaic constellations. But constellations are not discovered, they’re imaginary bodies. Ptolemy missed an entire quarter of the sky, and this information could only be added during the colonial voyages in the 16th century.
Our current knowledge of astrophysics insists on the standardization of stars and constellations for the sake of the photographic process, but in fact, tells us that not only are constellations imaginary, but they also serve no purpose whatsoever in astronomy. Why do we insist then on the star map? Russian painter Alexandra Paperno turned to the star maps at the beginning of her career in the early 2000s, not necessarily out of an interest in the vast cosmic space and our perception of the structure of the universe, but from a vantage point that resembles more an architecture of first principles, with primary and secondary qualities: What are pictorial spaces? What is an empty space? What are spaces generally? Living as we are, in a moment largely defined by hyper-metaphors of time such as acceleration, apocalypse and the instant, our relationship to space is tawdry and unimaginative; space is a site of incarceration.
Alexandra Paperno. Argo Navis (from ‘Abolished Constellations’ series), 2016. Ink on paper, 76×56 cm
But our living spaces have little to do with the Aristotelian metaphors of place around the line and the point, or the fixed abode or point of origin in the myth: Our spaces are devoured by multiple overlapping temporalities, and are embedded in a percolation of spatiotemporal continuity, like a crumpled handkerchief, to use a metaphor of Michel Serres, out of which a viscous substance oozes out that contains the present as debris. In the Star Maps (2003-2005), Paperno captures what Petrus Schaesberg called the misty uncertainty of the sky, following two central interrelated ideas: First, the scant appearance of the starry sky in the history of representation of space in general as we have received it from Western painting, and secondly, the Kantian notion of the sublime, as an aesthetic category beyond the senses. The modern pictorial space resembles the stellar void: It’s unarticulated, ambiguous but never absent.
During Paperno’s research on star maps, the realization that different astronomical atlases and maps contained different constellations in the early modern period, and a curious art historical reference, the minor constellations Sculptor and Pictor (included in the Star Maps), discovered by French astronomer Abbé Nicholas Louis de Lacaille in the 1750s, and located in the southern hemisphere, led to an amazing revelation: As astronomical societies were being modernized throughout the Western world, in 1922, the modern map of 88 constellations was adopted (it was agreed that no more constellations would be added) and then more than 50 constellations, some dating back to antiquity, but for the most part coined by American and European astronomers mapping the southern skies, were abolished for a variety of reasons. Some of these were considered inaccurate, ambiguous, too faint, or too large. Looking at earlier star maps, the Russian painter carefully recomposed the fifty-one constellations as single wooden panels (also executed on paper in a different iteration).
Many of these constellations are unfamiliar to us, with their Latin names, such as “Gladii Electorales Saxonici” (Crossed swords of the Electorate of Saxony, d. 1684, by Gottfried Kirch), “Machina Electrica” or “Officina Typographica” (Electricity Generator and Printshop, d. 1800 and 1801, by Johann Elert Bode), but the style of christening the stars gives us a lot of information about the ambitions of the Enlightenment era and the scientific revolutions. At the heart of Paperno’s project, however, there’s no stars as an object of contemplation but a void of knowledge and consciousness: How would it be possible to abolish something that in fact never existed? An international bureaucracy of knowledge dethroned an imaginary which, however impractical for modern science, was richly embedded in the fabric of our historicity, and the beginning of wonder, from an era when we began to search our yet unfinished destiny on earth.
Although the sky, or rather, the void, is alive and not static (our galaxy is not necessarily too privileged a location for sighting stars, being too far away from the center of star formations, a place where life would be impossible), all the Ptolemaic constellations survived into the modern map, with the exception of one: “Argo Novis”, known since early antiquity under different names. It was considered unwieldy by science as De Lacaille explained in 1763, from his observation point in Cape Town, South Africa (there he asserted the position of nearly 10,000 stars), that there were more than a hundred and sixty stars in it, and it was initially broken into three different constellations Carina, Pupis, and Vela; Pyxis Nautica was added later. The Argo Novis was not abolished, but dismantled. Yet the history of the constellation and its accompanying myth (we are unable to ascertain which came first), dates back to the earliest era of transmissions and transformations in the Near East.
Alexandra Paperno. Abolished Constellations, 2016. Installation view at the ‘Observatory’, curated by Simon Mraz. Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Science and its campus at Lower Arkhyz, Russia, 2016. Photograph by Yuri Palmin.
A discoverer of constellations himself, Johann Elert Bode tells us in 1801: “This figure commemorates the famous ship of antiquity, which was built according to legend at the command of Minerva and Neptune in Thessaly from Argo, and it is that which the Greek hero Jason and the Argonauts used to collect the Golden Fleece from the place of the eastern shore of the Black Sea known as Colchis.” Argo Navis as a constellation appears first in a list by Eudoxus of Cnidus in the 4th century BC, and the ship was known to the author of the Odyssey. In a passage concerning the witchlike goddess Circe (Hom. Od. 12.69-72), as she is giving Odysseus instructions for his return voyage, she explains that the Sirens are located between Scylla and Charbydis, adding that there is only one seafaring ship that has ever passed through, and that is the Argo, with the intervention of Hera, who loved the argonaut Jason.
The ship was thought to be a variety of galley, an oceangoing craft with a shallow draft, low profile and long narrow hull (Barentine), and according to Eratosthenes, the constellation represented the first ship to sail the ocean, long before Jason’s time. A myth of the construction of the ship was relayed by Apollonius Rhodius in his Argonautica, claiming that its builder was Argus, under the supervision of Athena (Apollon. 1.109-114). The Argonautica, composed in the 3rd century AD, is the only surviving epic poem of the Hellenistic era, incorporating Apollonius Rhodius’ research into geography, Homeric literature and Greek ethnography. Its most enduring innovation upon the Greek epic is the possibility of love between a hero and a heroine, exemplified in the vivacious story of Jason and Medea, but the story was well known in a much earlier period, and the myth of the Argonauts underlies the Homeric epic as a memory source.
Jason’s father Aeson was removed from the throne by his brother Pelias, and Jason was then entrusted to the centaur Chiron. After his upbringing with the centaur, and learning of his true story, Jason set for Iolcus, and upon confronting Pelias, the king devised for him the toil of an impossibly difficult voyage, in order that he might lose his home-return among strangers or at sea, with a mission to find the Golden Fleece. Jason visited Hera at Dodona, and with her help, Athena would have the ship built from pine trees grown on Mount Pelion, and he assembled a crew with as many heroes as he could find, known as the Argonauts. At last they reached Colchis and presented their demand to King Aetes, but unwilling to part with his most prized possession, the king declared Jason would have to catch and subdue two fire-breathing bulls dedicated to Hephaestus and use the bulls to plow a stony field sacred to Ares.
Alexandra Paperno, Pictor, (from the Star Maps Series), 2003, mixed media on canvas, 150×120 cm
But there would be more: He would have to sow the field with dragon’s teeth and then slay the army of giants that would rise. Finally, after defeating the guardian dragon, the Fleece would be his. Jason was then enchanted with the king’s daughter Medea, and agreed to marry her in exchange for her help (she’s a skilled sorceress). With the fleece in hand, Jason, Medea and the Argonauts set off from Colchis, taking Absyrtus, the king’s only son, as a hostage. A Colchian vessel set off in pursuit of the Argo and easily overtook it, and sensing that the end was near, Medea killed Absyrtus, dropping pieces of the body overboard. As expected from an epic, the Argo was led off as a punishment and a number of storms were sent by Zeus, and then Jason is told they should seek ritual purification with Circe, the famous nymph living on the island of Aeaea, whom we know well from the Odyssey.
[The episode of Circe in the Odyssey is one of the main events in my parafiction, “The Charonion”]
In Book IV of the Argonautica, the Argonauts find Circe bathing in salt water, surrounded by wild animals. The goddess invites Jason, Medea and the Argonauts into her mansion, and without any further ado, they show her the bloody sword used to cut the body of Absyrtus, and Circe realizes quickly enough that they have come in order to be purified of murder. After the purification, Medea tells Circe of their toll in great details, but omits the murder of Absyrtus. Circe knows the truth and disapproves of their crime, but on account of her kinship with Medea, she promises to cause them no harm and orders them to depart from her island immediately. It seems as if after the visit to Aeaea, the Argonautica comes to a happy conclusion in Thessaly, but ambiguous accounts remain, telling of intrigues, murders, escapes and the rise of the ship to heaven as a constellation, or another version in which a beam from the Argo’s stern detaches and kills Jason instantly while he slept under a tree.
The long journey of the Argo Navis in the mythography, protracted, inconclusive, and ultimately unfinishable, always reminds me of the liminal space of Paperno’s Abolished Constellations. In its first argonautic expedition, the Argo Navis alongside the other fifty abolished constellations (let us name a few more: Keeper of Harvests, Pendulum Clock, Marble Sculpture, Tigris River), were displayed in 2016, at a derelict unconsecrated 8th century church linked to the now extinct Albanian-Scythian Christian community, in a scientific village home to the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Large Altazimuth Telescope (for several years the largest single primary optical reflecting telescope in the world, but now an anachronism) in Nizhny Arkhyz, perched on the mountains of the northern Caucasus. The panels were assembled as a grid construction that resembles an altarpiece, doubling up the sense of what is meant by heavenly. A heaven that has fallen, an abolished heaven.
It was an impenetrable site… A flight from Moscow to the resort town of Mineralnye Voda, followed by long bus journeys in the mountains, and an hour-long walk inside the terrain of Lower Arkhyz, in a frosty autumn, crossing small rivulets and mud passages, in order to arrive at an altarpiece to something that doesn’t exist anymore because in fact it was never real – the gods are dead. This speaks to Paperno’s notion of the ruin as a central notion in European civilization: The ruin is fresh because it was already ruined from the outset. Later on, the abolished constellations traveled to Berlin, where they were on show in a window storefront in a gallery space where it would be the last exhibition before its eventual folding up, or on the Danish island of Møn, a biosphere reserve in the Baltic sea, loosely connected to another island, Zealand, with irregular transportation.
Alexandra Paperno. Abolished Constellations, 2016. Installation view at the ‘Observatory’, curated by Simon Mraz. Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Science and its campus at Lower Arkhyz, Russia, 2016. Photograph by Yuri Palmin.
In these precarious, remote, vanishing, half-real sites, the witness to the constellations, is forced to reflect on the irrational infinity of space as such, and in the words of Schaesberg discussing Paperno’s star maps: “Reflective moods inevitably set in when one contemplates the constellations, but Paperno’s overall concept of this series — including single stars, star maps, and constellations, not to mention still lifes with globes — conjures up the Thracian maid’s laughter when Thales of Miletus fell into the well, the epitome of disdain for astronomy’s endeavors, and hints at today’s amazing awareness that we human beings, in a remote corner of the boundless universe, are terribly alone.” These empty and half-empty interiors of the pictorial space, fragile and tense, make us dwell in a world of wonder: It is a world without nature, abandoned, and yet filled with our own specters.
In the spring of 2020, as the abolished constellations in their single individual panels, rested alone in a studio, in the center of Moscow, after their unlikely argonautic travels, still incomplete, the world closed down on us, and we became separated not only from each other, but also from our world, perhaps indefinitely. Unsure whether the purification of Circe would be enough to bring us from Aeaea to Thessaly, for the first time in our lifetimes, we wandered in the silent dark. And perhaps then we remembered the lives of those early humans, who spent long nights under the stars, around a bonfire, telling each other the stories of Jason and Odysseus, under different names, giving new names to Sirius and the Bear, as if they had never been named before. I then interrogated one of the abolished constellations, the “Machina Electrica” (d. 1800), hanging on my walls: Will the night sky still be there if we stopped looking? An answer came from the Odyssey, a year and a half later, on the shores of Seleucia Pieria, during a clear night: ἥ τ᾽ αὐτοῦ στρέφεται καί τ᾽ Ὠρίωνα δοκεύει / She turns about in the same spot and watches for Orion.
Alexandra Paperno. Grey Sun, 2003. ‘Self-Love Among the Ruins’ exhibition view, curated by Ekaterina Inozemtseva. Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, 2018. Courtesy Smart Art.
Bibliography
John C. Barentine, The Lost Constellations: A History of Obsolete, Extinct, or Forgotten Star Lore, Springer, Praxis Series, 2016
Margalit Finkelberg, “She turns about in the same spot and watches for Orion”: Ancient Criticism and Exegesis of Od. 5.274 = Il. 18.488”, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 44 (2004), p. 231-244
Theodossiou, E., Manimanis, V. N., Mantarakis, P., & Dimitrijevic, M. S., “Astronomy and Constellations in the Iliad and Odyssey”, Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, Vol. 14, No. 1, p. 22 – 30 (2011)
Alexandra Paperno & Katya Inozemtseva, “Self-Love Among the Ruins: A Conversation between Katya Inozemtseva & Alexandra Paperno”, in Alexandra Paperno. Self Love Among the Ruins, Ad Marginem Press, 2019, p. 6-23
Petrus Schaesberg, “Alexandra Paperno: Star Maps”, in Alexandra Paperno: Star Maps, National Center for Contemporary Arts Moscow, 2007, p. 5-14
Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a writer and art critic based in Istanbul. He’s also tweeting about Classics, continental philosophy, contemporary art and Turkey/Greece. He’s the co-editor of Perambulation.
Because you have asked me, Ioannes, my dearest companion in Christ, in what manner it is proper for you to study in acquiring a treasury of knowledge, such a plan is handed on from me to you: that you should choose to enter through little streams, and not suddenly into the sea, because it is proper that one come gradually through the easier things to the more difficult ones.
This is, therefore, my advice and your instruction. I order you to be slow in speech and slow in acceding to the mouthpiece. Embrace purity of conscience. Do not allow yourself to be free for speech. You should frequently esteem the wine cellar if you wish to be brought into it. Present yourself as lovable to everyone. Don’t look at all deeply into the deeds of others. Don’t show yourself as very familiar with anyone, because excessive familiarity breeds contempt and offers material for subtraction from study. Don’t in any way get yourself embroiled in secular words or deeds. Don’t forget to follow the footsteps of the holy and the good. Don’t consider from whom you are hearing something, but commend to memory whatever good is spoken.
Make sure that you understand what you read and hear. Make yourself certain about doubtful things. Try to store up whatever you can in the wardrobe of your mind as if you wanted to fill up a jar. Don’t seek things higher than your station. Following these steps, you will profer and lead forth the useful blooms and fruits on the vine of the God of Heavenly Hosts as long as you live. If you will have followed all of this eagerly, you will be able to attain what you affect.
Quia quaesisti a me, in Christo mihi carissime Ioannes, qualiter te studere oporteat in thesauro scientiae acquirendo, tale a me tibi traditur consilium: ut per rivulos, non statim in mare, eligas introire, quia per faciliora ad difficiliora oportet devenire. Haec est ergo monitio mea et instructio tua. Tardiloquum te esse iubeo et tarde ad locutorium accedentem; conscientiae puritatem amplectere. Orationi vacare non desinas; cellam frequenter diligas si vis in cellam vinariam introduci. Omnibus te amabilem exhibe; nihil quaere penitus de factis aliorum; nemini te multum familiarem ostendas, quia nimia familiaritas parit contemptum et subtractionis a studio materiam subministrat; de verbis et factis saecularium nullatenus te intromittas; discursus super omnia fugias; sanctorum et bonorum imitari vestigia non omittas; non respicias a quo audias, sed quidquid boni dicatur, memoriae recommenda; ea quae legis et audis, fac ut intelligas; de dubiis te certifica; et quidquid poteris in armariolo mentis reponere satage, sicut cupiens vas implere; altiora te ne quaesieris. Illa sequens vestigia, frondes et fructus in vinea Domini Sabaoth utiles, quandiu vitam habueris, proferes et produces. Haec si sectatus fueris, ad id attingere poteris, quod affectas
“Of all the things to be sought in this world, the first is wisdom, in which the form of the perfect good consists. Wisdom illuminates a person so that he may know himself, who was similar to others when he did not understand that he was made before others. Indeed, the immortal soul, illumined by wisdom, looks back upon its origin and recognizes how indecent it is, so that it seeks beyond itself for something for which that which it itself is could be enough. It is read on the tripod of Apollo, ‘gnoti sauton,’ that is, know thyself, because unsurprisingly if a person is not unremembering of his own origin, he may recognize everything which is subject to change, though it be nothing.
The approved opinion among philosophers holds that the spirit is composed from all parts of nature. The Timaeus of Plato formed “actuality” out of divided and undivided and mixed substance, and in the same way out of the same and diverse nature, and a mixed nature from both. For it catches both the initial elements and those things which follow the initial elements, because it comprehends the invisible causes of things through its intelligence, and it collects the visible forms of actual things through its sense impressions, and once it has been divided, it collects movement into two spheres, because it either moves out of the senses to sensible things, or it ascends to invisible things through intelligence. Then, pulling the similarities of things to itself it circles back, and this is because the same mind, which can take universal things, is put together from every substance and nature, because it represents the figure of similitude. For, it was the Pythagorean belief that similar things are comprehended by similar things, as clearly the rational soul could in no way comprehend all things unless it were composed of all things. In support of this, someone says
‘We comprehend the earth with our earthly being, the aether with flame, humor with liquid, and the air with our breath.’
LIBER PRIMUS
CAPUT I
De origine artium.
Omnium expetendorum prima est sapientia, in qua perfecti boni forma consistit. sapientia illuminat hominem ut seipsum agnoscat, qui ceteris similis fuit cum se prae ceteris factum esse non intellexit. [741D] immortalis quippe animus sapientia illustratus respicit principium suum et quam sit indecorum agnoscit, ut extra se quidquam quaerat, cui quod ipse est, satis esse poterat. scriptum legitur in tripode Apollinis: gnoti seauton, id est, cognosce te ipsum, quia nimirum homo si non originis suae immemor esset, omne quod mutabilitati obnoxium est, quam sit nihil, agnosceret. probata apud philosophos sententia animam ex cunctis naturae partibus asserit esse compactam. et Timaeus Platonis ex dividua et individua mixtaque substantia, itemque eadem et diversa, et ex utroque commixta natura, quo universitas designatur, entelechiam formavit. [742A] ipsa namque et initia et quae initia consequuntur capit, quia et invisibiles per intelligentiam rerum causas comprehendit, et visibiles actualium formas per sensuum passiones colligit, sectaque in orbes geminos motum glomerat, quia sive per sensus ad sensibilia exeat sive per intelligentiam ad invisibilia ascendat. ad seipsam rerum similitudines trahens regyrat, et hoc est quod eadem mens, quae universorum capax est, ex omni substantia atque natura, quo similitudinis repraesentet figuram, coaptatur. Pythagoricum namque dogma erat similia similibus comprehendi, ut scilicet anima rationalis nisi ex omnibus composita foret, nullatenus omnia comprehendere posset, [742B] secundum quod dicit quidam:
Terram terreno comprehendimus, aethera flammis, Humorem liquido, nostro spirabile flatu.
Hugo of St. Victor, Didascalion 3.13 (11-12th Century CE)
“There is no one to whom it has been granted to know everything, but at the same time there is no one who has not chanced to receive some special gift from nature. The prudent reader, then, listens to everyone and reads everything, and spurns no writing, no person, no learning. He seeks from all without discrimination what he sees is lacking in himself, and considers not how much he knows, but how much he does not know. Here, they note that saying of Plato, ‘I prefer to learn everything reverently, rather than to insert my own ideas shamelessly.’ For, why do you blush to learn and feel no shame in ignorance? The first is a greater disgrace than the second. Or, why do you make pretensions to the highest claims when you toss about in the dregs? You should consider, instead, what your abilities are able to accomplish. He approaches the problem best who does so in proper order. Many people, in trying to make a leap, simply fall head-first. Therefore, avoid excessive haste. In this way, you will arrive more quickly to wisdom. Learn gladly what you do not know from everyone, because humility can make common to you what nature has made each person’s private property. You will be wiser than all if you wish to learn from everyone; those who receive gifts from everyone become wiser than everyone.
You should therefore hold no knowledge as worthless, because all knowledge is good. If you have the time, you should not refuse to at least give every writing a once-over. If you find no profit in it, you at least do not waste anything, especially since there is in my opinion no writing which does not at least propose something worthy of being sought, if it is read in a proper spot and order. If a piece of writing does not have anything particularly special about it, the diligent examiner of words will latch on to something not found elsewhere – and the more rare it is, the more delight he will feel.”
nemo est cui omnia scire datum sit, neque quisquam rursum cui aliquid speciale a natura accepisse non contigerit. prudens igitur lector omnes libenter audit, omnia legit, non scripturam, non personam, non doctrinam spernit. indifferenter ab omnibus quod sibi deesse videt quaerit, nec quantum sciat, sed quantum ignoret, considerat. hinc illud Platonicum aiunt: Malo aliena verecunde discere, quam mea impudenter ingerere. cur enim discere erubescis, et nescire non verecundaris? pudor iste maior est illo. aut quid summa affectas cum tu iaceas in imo? considera potius quid vires tuae ferre valeant. aptissime incedit, qui incedit ordinate. [774B] quidam dum magnum saltum facere volunt, praecipitium incidunt. noli ergo nimis festinare. hoc modo citius ad sapientiam pertinges. ab omnibus libenter disce quod tu nescis, quia humilitas commune tibi facere potest quod natura cuique proprium fecit. sapientior omnibus eris, si ab omnibus discere volueris. qui ab omnibus accipiunt, omnibus ditiores sunt.
nullam denique scientiam vilem teneas, quia omnis scientia bona est. nullam, si vacat, scripturam vel saltem legere contemnas. si nihil lucraris, nec perdis aliquid, maxime cum nulla scriptura sit, secundum meam aestimationem, quae aliquid expetendum non proponat, si convenienti loco et ordine tractetur; [774C] quae non aliquid etiam speciale habeat, quod diligens verbi scrutator alibi non inventum, quanto rarius, tanto gratius carpat.
Previously, librarii were called bibliopolas, because the Greeks call a book a biblion. The same people are called both librarii and antiquarians, but librarii are those who copy out both old and new things, while antiquarians are those who write out only the old, from which fact they derive their name. The scribe has received this name from writing (scribendo), expressing their duty with the quality of the word.
The scribe’s tools are the reed and the quill, because it is from these tools that words are fashioned on the page. But the reed comes from a plant, while the quill comes from a bird; its tip is divided into two, with its unity preserved throughout its whole form. I think that this is on account of the mystery rite and signifies the Old and New Testaments on its two points, by which the sacramen of the word is expressed as it pours forth from the blood of the Passion.
The reed (calamus) is so called because it lays down its liquid. For this reason, among sailors the word calare means “to set down”. The quill (penna) however, gets its name from hanging (pendendo), that is to say, from flying. It is, as I have said, proper to birds.
The sheets (foliae) of books are so called either from their similarity to the leaves of trees, or because they are made from folles, that is, from the hides which are typically taken from slain animals. The parts of these are called pages (paginae) because they are joined together (compingantur) in turn.
Verses are so called by the common people because the ancients used to write in the same way that they ploughed the land. At first, they drew the stylus from left to right, and then they turned it around on the following line, and then the succeeding line was again written from left to right. Rustic people still call these things verses. A scheda is a page which is still being corrected and not yet put back into the books. This is a Greek word, just like tomus.
An example of the boustrophedon mode of writing which Isidore describes here.
DE LIBRARIIS ET EORVM INSTRVMENTIS. Librarios antea bibliopolas dictos. Librum enim Graeci BIBLON vocant. Librarii autem iidem et antiquarii vocantur: sed librarii sunt qui et nova scribunt et vetera; antiquarii, qui tantummodo vetera, unde et nomen sumpserunt. Ab scribendo autem scriba nomen accepit, officium exprimens vocabuli qualitate. Instrumenta scribae calamus et pinna. Ex his enim verba paginis infiguntur; sed calamus arboris est, pinna avis; cuius acumen in dyade dividitur, in toto corpore unitate servata, credo propter mysterium, ut in duobus apicibus Vetus et Novum Testamentum signaretur, quibus exprimitur verbi sacramentum sanguine Passionis effusum. Dictus autem calamus quod liquorem ponat. Vnde et apud nautas calare ponere dicitur. Pinna autem a pendendo vocata, id est volando. Est enim, ut diximus, avium. Foliae autem librorum appellatae sive ex similitudine foliorum arborum, seu quia ex follibus fiunt, id est ex pellibus, qui de occisis pecudibus detrahi solent; cuius partes paginae dicuntur, eo quod sibi invicem conpingantur. Versus autem vulgo vocati quia sic scribebant antiqui sicut aratur terra. A sinistra enim ad dexteram primum deducebant stilum, deinde convertebantur ab inferiore, et rursus ad dexteram versus; quos et hodieque rustici versus vocant. Scheda est quod adhuc emendatur, et necdum in libris redactum est; et est nomen Graecum, sicut et tomus.
